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Cassette 5: Winter 1995/Transcript
This is the official transcript for the episode which can also be accessed for free at'' patreon.com/withinthewires''SIDE A Well, Sigrid. It has been only two weeks since I once again bid you goodbye and left The Cradle in your hands and I miss you already. I was glad to be with you again, even if my stay could only be temporary. I’m pleased to see how well you are doing, stepping in as my deputy. I did not tell you this in person, but you are doing a very good job. You should be quite satisfied with your work. You should be quite satisfied with most of your work. But I have to say – and I do not know how much responsibility you can be expected to take for this – the congregation in general has become more closed-minded in the time I’ve been away. It is one thing to take a stand for your own beliefs against a world that dismisses them, but it is quite another to assume that you have nothing left to learn from others who might, if you would care to let them, expand your view of the world in which you live. Honestly. I had so much hope for our little community. I still do. I have so much hope. I had hoped they all felt the same way. I had hoped they would take every opportunity to grow and change so that we, in turn, might grow and shape our world. I had hoped they would be willing to learn from someone willing to teach. And yet when I bring them a teacher, they spurn his wisdom. You spurn his wisdom. You spurn his vision. Jure is a brother. Not borne unto us as a baby, but adopted by us. Do we not take the hand of a brother in the Cradle. Do we not welcome a family member into the circle of family? I understand it is uncomfortable to have an outsider in our midst. Someone who has not lived among us, who does not know our ways. Who does not yet fully understand our ideals or our plans. Sigrid. Jure is a good man. He has knowledge that could be of profound use to us, that is why I brought him. He was refused a conversation with Lisette, who told him she did not want a corporate man of the Society in her home. He was turned away by Ole from viewing the classrooms, yet Ole’s textbooks contain no secrets. Jure is a registered member of Society, but that does not mean he wishes to imprison us. He wishes to learn from us. He is sympathetic to the Cradle. Even if he were not, he could not report our activities to the Internal Investigations Division, for he has become too entrenched in my efforts abroad to avoid implicating himself. It does not benefit him in any way to harm us. In fact, he benefits from our gain. We are allies in his efforts to change how Society treats children and families, for our Cradle is growing across the globe, and as we grow, Jure’s business can grow. We need to teach Jure about ourselves in order for him to give us the help we need, but I cannot believe so many among us are unwilling to do that. Do we not want to grow? Do we not want to adapt? Do we not want to realise our full potential? Are we content to simply live out our lives? Tend our own small garden day after day so that we may eat the food we grow in order to live another day to tend our garden once again? We are here for more than that. But we cannot achieve what we want without help and guidance. I found someone who could give us help and guidance and I went to great trouble to bring him to our home so we could all, both individually and as a group, benefit from his wisdom. Do you think – does the congregation think that I would bring in someone who wasn’t worthy of their trust? That would endanger their children or their freedoms? My mother was the mother of the Cradle. I am its first child. I owe only kindness and nurture, and that is all that I give. Do they think that I would do anything, anything at all that wasn’t intended to directly benefit them, and our aims as a collective? It is me, in truth, that you – that they – do not accept, when they do not accept Jure. Jure has questions, yes. There are things about our life that he does not understand, or rather, that he is not completely confident in yet. It is understandable, if you think about it. If the congregation would think about it, they would understand his position. He doesn’t understand us fully, but that does not mean he fears or distrusts us. He is learning. He is taking the time to see our faces, to take us in as human beings, not some abstract cult, as we’re talked about in Council sessions or newspapers. You have grown up protected, Sigrid. Many of the congregation have grown up protected. You do not understand how the rest of the world are raised. You do not read the newspapers, see the television reports about outsiders, the fringe of humanity, the lies about what we intend. It takes a brave and willing man like Jure to visit us. To see us. To offer us not only provisions and protection but patience as well. You know that most children are raised in centres, that they are kept from their biological parents and raised without any traditions of family. I have told you the horrors of what the Society does. But I don’t believe you have truly thought about what those children are told about the world and why it is like this. The Great Reckoning happened long ago, but its effects were devastating, and they remain so. The world is afraid to repeat those decades of violence. The Society was built with the aim of preventing that at all costs, even if it means disconnecting mothers and their babies. By nature, the academic philosophers who built the new Society argued that human beings cleave to their groups. To their families, to their countries, to whatever group makes them feel safe. It’s how we have evolved. It’s what kept us alive, in the early days, as we were becoming what we now are. But that instinct is also an instinct to fight. To attempt to destroy anything that you think might be a danger to your group. To your tribe. And so, for millennia, this was a world of war. For millennia people tried to destroy each other before they would themselves be destroyed. And that ultimately led to our Great Reckoning – where we were, in truth, almost destroyed. Every one of us. Children born today are not given the opportunity to cleave to a family, to learn from their elders, to establish tribes and nations and communes. They are taught to live under oppressive law, believing that freedom is a worthy trade for non-violence. This presumes, of course, our world is without violence. It is not. It is full of IID agents hunting us, imprisoning us, trapping us, telling us we must have identification cards and corporate jobs. You have never seen this, Sigrid, but it is real. It is more real than the Bergkonge hiding among the trees, drawing us to our deaths with beckoning whispers. It is more real than the serpent in the lake whose shadow is surely just a trick of the sun. Jure grew up in this world, was trained by this Society, and is only beginning to comprehend how deep our Cradle is, how full of love and potential. Eventually we will try to convince The Society that our family is far more beautiful than dangerous, but we must remember why they need convincing. Why Jure needs convincing. He needs time to see why our way of life is right. And we need to give him that time, so that we can learn from him how to reveal that truth to everyone else. He wants us to succeed, Sigrid, because he knows the horrors of what the Society has done to basic human nature. I hope you can understand this, Sigrid. I hope the congregation can understand this. We need to understand, if we are to survive. SIDE B My friends. My family. I heard a story on my travels that I’d like to share with you. A group of friends were sharing a house together in the countryside. They worked together farming the land. Not in the way we farm, you understand, they were not aiming to be self-sufficient. They oversaw vast amounts of land that were planted with wheat and corn and with other grains. They were responsible for nurturing the grains as they grew, monitoring them to make sure they were healthy and strong and, when it came time, to harvest them. Once harvested, their crops were sent all across the land. They were ground into flour, or dried into cereals. They were put into bright packages and sold in shops and helped feed and nourish all the people of the land. These people take their acres of earth and use it to help make people they will never meet strong and healthy. Because their work involves so much land, of course, they are relatively isolated. They see each other, they see others who work the land alongside them, but unless they venture into the city, they do not often come across strangers – although their work influences the lives of so many strangers. They lived closed off from the rest of the world, entertaining themselves with the same stories over and over, each night after dinner. And those fictional stories grew into legends, which grew into superstitions. Stories of yellow-fanged men with long chins and bent necks lurking about their farm. These figures snatched those who strayed too far from the land and ate them. Not just ate them, but ate them slowly, ate them alive, from the softest part of the belly out. Repetition of old stories builds religions, entrenches ideas, cycles angst and despair back onto itself, feeding the flames of fear until they engulf all who dwell together. One day, this group of farmers were preparing to share an evening meal. They were unhappy and stressed that day, as the crops were being infested by bugs. These bugs were always present in some numbers – the crops are part of an ecosystem, after all – but that year they were unusually high in number and the farmers were concerned about the quantity of plants that would be destroyed. After a hard day of trying to protect their crops from this fate, the farmers were overwhelmed, and all they wanted to do was eat their food and go to bed. But they were interrupted. A knock came at the door, and when they opened it two young women were on the other side. They told the farmers that they were travelling across the country but they’d run into some trouble, and they were now stranded with no money, car or food. They asked if they could sleep in one of the sheds on the farm, and perhaps have a little something to eat. None of the farmers felt like helping, for they were tired, and face to face with interlopers, they were frightened. But one farmer, against the protests of his friends, acting on instinct, or good manners, or kindness, invited the women in, laid a place for them at the table, piled their plates high with food and filled their glasses with wine. He offered his own bed so the women would have somewhere warm and safe to sleep, while he slept on the couch. In the morning the farmers woke to find the two young women gone. The farmers searched their home, not for the two women, but for missing objects, missing money, missing people. But everything was as it had been. No one eaten, no goods stolen. By the bed, the women had left a note reading: “Thank you. There will be relief.” and then they were gone. Over the next several days, the home became infested with spiders, large brown spiders, and the farmers blamed themselves for the apparent curse of the two strangers. Spiders hung in doorways and filled sheds and storage silos. There were spiders crawling out of tractor covers. Sometimes they woke to spiders in their beds, and the farmers were outraged and a little bit scared. The spiders were also in their fields, living among their crops, and it was only then that they realized the other bugs were gone – they had been eaten by the spiders. The lettuce and tomatoes and aubergines plump and healthy, the leaves of herbs whole and untouched. There will be relief, they thought. And there was. Did the women have power to bring spiders to protect their land? That is a question open to interpretation, but I will posit to you that it is no more ridiculous a premise than long-chinned men with yellow fangs hunting farmers in the dark of night. You can call it karma, if you like. You can call it God. You can say that people who do good things are rewarded for them. Or you can wonder if those women were more than women. That by dismissing them, the farmers would have missed an opportunity to give shelter to something beyond themselves. It’s easy to live in a world where you have decided what you think your place is. What the place of others is. It’s very easy to establish your assumptions and live by them. It’s harder, sometimes, to remain open to ideas and people that could challenge you. It’s harder, sometimes, to look at the world around you, the situations you find yourself in, the people you meet, hoping that you can learn from it. To not just look for validation of the things you already believe. While it hurts me to be away from you, I have learned so much in my travels. I have learned so much about myself. I know now that I can trust myself. I know that what I see in other people is real. I know that I can sense the true meaning in their words. I know that people cannot hide from me. I trust myself wholly, dear family, and I hope you know that I will only ever do what is best for you. I will only ever trust people who are truly deserving of that trust. I hope you know that when I seek help for you, for us, that that help will be exactly what we need. I’m not asking you to understand how I am working. I don’t know if it’s possible to understand that. But it’s imperative that you accept it. It’s imperative that you accept that I am working for you. For us. I am the only one who can. Category:Transcripts